When Carnatic and jazz musician Prasanna first picked up a guitar at the age of 10, his friends set him a benchmark. They said they would know he'd arrived when he could play Boney M's 'Rasputin'. Fortunately, Prasanna set his sights much higher, and today - 25 years later - he's come out with Electric Ganesha Land, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix.
"I wanted to do something based on Carnatic music while also exploring the electric guitar in a very personal manner. And I think Jimi opened the door to all electric guitar exploration," says the Boston-based 35-year-old.
And that's what Prasanna
does - play Carnatic music on the electric guitar. (His website puts it this way: he plays "one of the world's most ancient musical forms on one of the world's most modern instruments.")
But with this album, it's not just that he wanted to play Carnatic music in a style that included distortion and feedback and all those Hendrix signatures. Prasanna's previous, Be the Change, was a Carnatic-Jazz fusion album with a line-up of great musicians like Grammy-winning bassist Viktor Wooten. "Here, I wanted to showcase what I consider world-class percussion talent in Chennai. So both these ideas came together - a guitar-rock album, and using the mridangam, ghatam, and so on."
Prasanna, rated among the top contemporary guitarists in the world, has a diverse body of work - eleven Carnatic albums, an eclectic solo guitar album, Peaceful, and a special triple guitar project, Guitars, with Belgian band Aka Moon. His theatre works include the original score for a dance theatre adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Tempest', which premiered in Sydney, and also for fusion dance production 'Sanaatana' that premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. He's also worked with Indian music directors like Illayraja, and AR Rahman on films like Lagaan and Swades. Prasanna has also played on the soundtrack of the upcoming French film Essaye Moi. A grand nephew of the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, his guitar work featured prominently on the government-sponsored CD-Rom on the latter's life.
For all that talk about Carnatic music, Prasanna insists Electric Ganesha Land isn't about ragas so much as rock-guitar sounds. "I used custom-made tube amps. I recorded in big rooms designed for string orchestras, where I was just this one guy with a guitar. I didn't compose the songs as much as I designed the sound for them." That's why the track titled 'Dark Sundae in Triplicane' has seven or eight different guitar sounds, "representative of the whole spectrum of rock guitaring." But there's the raga element too, even if it is almost a by-product. "My work is about camouflage. I think like a visual artist. I may paint a tree, but I don't want to assume that you also look at it as a tree. It's only as an afterthought that I discovered I'd used over 27 ragas in this album," says Prasanna. "A lot of my fans are raga geeks. This gives them something to chew on," he playfully adds.
Prasanna knows a thing or two about being a music geek. After graduating from IIT, Madras, with a degree in Naval Architecture, he went to Boston's Berklee College of Music, the world's largest independent music college. He's since stayed on in Boston, but he's also in India a lot. "I have several projects in both countries, so I juggle my time between here and there." That duality is reflected in tracks like 'Eruption in Bangalore'. "The city represents the contrast between what people know as India, the land of snake charmers, and what India is today, a place of C++ programmers. The song is my tribute to Bangalore." But the title is a nod in a different direction, the similarly named - and now legendary - guitar solo from Van Halen's debut album.
Almost as fascinating as the pieces are these backstories. The psychedelic 'Dark Sundae in Triplicane', for instance, is named after a neighbourhood in Chennai that has this very conservative connotation, but it's the least "classical" piece in the album. "It's something I wrote for a classical string orchestra, and it's been converted to this arrangement. It has influences of electronica, jazz, African elements, plus this Led Zeppelin wall of sound," says the musician. But why Triplicane? "My family grew up there. I needed a reference to Chennai in the album, so this was it."

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